I think we can all take something away from John Updike’s rules, whether we are critiquing someone’s writing, art, or any form of creative expression—even a fashion choice. Not all apply to things other than literature, but the “added sixth” is a nice lesson. Here they are:

1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.

2. Give enough direct quotation—at least one extended passage—of the book’s prose so the review’s reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.

3. Confirm your description of the book with a quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy précis.

4. Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending.

5. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author’s œuvre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it’s his and not yours?

To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser. Do not accept for review a book you are predisposed to dislike, or committed by friendship to like. Do not imagine yourself a caretaker of any tradition, an enforcer of any party standards, a warrior in any ideological battle, a corrections officer of any kind. Never, never try to put the author “in his place,” making of him a pawn in a contest with other reviewers. Review the book, not the reputation. Submit to whatever spell, weak or strong, is being cast. Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys of reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.

As always, the Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by The Broke and the Bookish. There’s about a billion participants each week so go check out some of the many others if you are keen to find a new series to read.

I already own at least parts of the first 7 series mentioned below so really, I have no excuse for not starting to read them sometime soon!

1. George R.R. Martin: A Song of Ice and Fire. Do I really have to explain myself here? Maybe rather try to explain why I, a self-proclaimed fantasy lover, haven’t read this one yet? Or watched the tv series? Well, I have no explanation and now, I own all the published books of this so I hope to get around to at least start reading it sometime this year.
   
2. Robin Hobb: The Farseer Trilogy. This is about a boy and his dog, roughly put. I have been told that it will make me cry. Not just a little bit, but full on ugly cry. That’s why I have put it off. But I have also been told that I will absolutely love this story of the bond between human and animals – so we’ll see which one will win out. Maybe it will be both!
3. Patrick Rothfuss: The Kingkiller Chronicle. I’m trying to wait with this one until the final one in the trilogy has been published. I have been told that it has quite a bit of cliff hangers and that it’s insanely good so I’m really trying to not read it before they are all out. It’s the story of a powerful wizard, how he became to be so powerful and how he ended up a fugitive.
4. Ken Follett: The Century Trilogy. Whatever I have forgotten or never known about 20th century history, politics etc, I expect to learn from reading this novel. I really enjoyed The Pillars of the Earth, so I expect to enjoy this one quite a bit – especially because I find the 20th century of more interest than the building of a cathedral in the Middle Ages… – even if that turned out to be rather exciting!
5. Deborah Harkness: All Souls Trilogy. This is supposed to be the intellectual’s Twilight. I like Vampires (Buffy, anyone?) but I have no intention of reading Twilight, ever! So this book about a young woman, a witch I think, who stumbles upon a bewitched manuscript which unleashes hordes of vampires, demons and witches, sounds right up my alley. I have heard both good and bad about this one so not sure if it will be a good read but I’m definitely going to give it a go!
6. Jasper Fforde: Shades of Grey. I have the first one of this trilogy – and it’s the only one published so far and the next one is not due out before 2015. So I have no guilt about not having started this one yet. Only thing is – I really want to read it soon because it sounds so cool. A society where your social status is determined by your ability to see colors? Fascinating!
7. Neal Stephenson: The Baroque Cycle. I own Quicksilver, the first one of this trilogy of huge books. It’s historical fiction, it’s about philosophy, religion and history and I don’t know what’s not a part of this book. I think it’s a very demanding book and that’s probably why I have put it off. But I want to give it a go – I think it will be a rewarding, though difficult, read.
8. Margaret Atwood: Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood, Maddaddam: I don’t know if this series has a name. But it doesn’t really matter, does it? I just want to read these – in part, because I want to explore Atwood some more since the two novels I have read by her (Alias Grace and The Handmaid’s Tale) have been really good, but also because Oryx and Crake is another post-apocalyptic tale from Atwood, this time about possibly the last human – and it just sounds really interesting.
9. John Updike: The Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom series. I just wrote about this one the other day when I rented the first one at the library. I’ve been wanting to read this for years! You just keep hearing about this one! It’s supposed to be so good and Updike is supposed to be one of the best contemporary (although now dead) American authors. I have only read one of his novels, Terrorist, so I really have not much of an impression of Updike. He is another author I want to explore so really, it’s about time I get around to the Rabbit books.
10. Jacqueline Carey: Phèdre’s Trilogy. This erotic fantasy about a young woman, part spy and part courtesan, is supposed to be really, really good. I have been hearing about it for years but am yet to buy and read it. I almost bought it last time I was in Paris and saw that W.H. Smith at Place du Concorde had the entire trilogy – but I ended up not buying it because I thought it would be easy enough to get it later and I had already picked out way too many books… I will read this one at some point!

Quite a bit of fantasy on my list, I think. It’s great because I love fantasy – I just don’t feel I have the time to commit to reading three books (or more!) in a row (which is silly since I can easily enough commit to reading huge, difficult books that take way more time than reading a fantasy trilogy). Anyway, I hope the making of this list will make me remember, that I actually really want to read these books!

Which series are on your list?

Related posts:

• Top Ten Auto-buy authors
• Top Ten Books I Read in 2012
• Top Ten Favorite New-To-Me Authors I Read In 2012
• Top Ten Books I Wouldn’t Mind Santa Bringing Me
• Top Ten Most Anticipated Books for 2013

I decided I wanted to fit in more reading this year to help with my work, and for my own pleasure – I love a good book! My taste is pretty eclectic, I think there is no particular type of book I enjoy – as long as it is a good one!

To catch up here’s what I read in February:

The Moving Finger  Agatha Christie

Nothing like a bit of genteel murder and the appearance of the common-sense of Miss Marple to make you feel comforted. I really enjoyed Agatha Christie’s skill in dialogue and characterization. I’ll be reading more of her work – slightly ashamed I haven’t read much of it before. The edition I borrowed from the library was the facsimile edition of the first edition published (as on the cover shown above). The typographic and cover design approach is fascinating to see.

Crash J G Ballard (showing four different edition covers)

Not for the squeamish or faint-hearted. Not for the prudish either. If you’re easily shocked don’t read this, if you like to challenge your ‘open-minded nature’ then do. The cover on the edition I read is the one with Elizabeth Taylor on the front. Not my favourite – think of these four I’d go for the last one shown – the folio edition. This image of the four covers comes from a literary blog – comingforyouproust. Like this blogger, I also thought it a remarkable book.

The Women Who Got Away John Updike

Well-written. I like to see a male writer’s point of view on his female conquests (fictional I assume).  An interesting comment on relationships and promiscuity – partly trapped in the 70′s.

Children’s books (read by me and/or my children)

For my 11-year-old:

The Unforgotten Coat Frank Cottrell Boyce

As usual for FCB this is a brilliant book that not only enters into the world of a Year 6 school child in Liverpool, but also the life of asylum-seeking Mongolian nomads. I read it after my son had finished it and loved the presentation as well as the story. The book is peppered with Polaroids ‘taken’ by the elder brother as they hide from the authorities who want to take them back to their homeland of Mongolia.  At the end of the book there is an addendum by FC Boyce which tells you about the Reader Organisation. Really good cover design, with linen hardback, spot varnishing and embossing to create a really classy and effective cover. The layout inside is also well thought out – especially for a fiction title with facsimile lined paper, and Polaroids ‘stuck in’ making the appearance of a scrapbook.

Dark Lord – The Teenage Years Jamie Thomson (alias Dirk Lloyd)

This book won the Roald Dahl Funny Prize in 2012. I struggle to find books that my son will like – his reading age is about 15 but some of the subject matter for a fifteen year old is not necessarily suitable for an 11-year-old. This book is aimed more at his actual age than his reading age, but was sophisticated enough to make him laugh and not bore him with too young a language style. There is another book by this author which I have ordered from the library.

For my 7-year-old:

Little Darlings Sam Llewelyn

My daughter is partly reading this herself – she is 7 but has a reading age of 8.1. There are some tricky words for her reading age – and partly being read this as a bedtime story by me – because I like it! Very funny, slightly subversive, good characters and a fast-moving plot.

My partner has been reading these library books:

(The Bob Marley books were ordered in as they weren’t in our actual branch stock – this is easy to do and your librarian can help you, or you can do this on-line, both for only a small fee)

The Periodic Tales – The curious lives of the elements Hugh Aldersley Williams

I and I The Natural Mystics Marley Tosh and Wailer Colin Grant

Marley Legend – An Illustrated Life of Bob Marley James Henke

‘

Photo by William Klein

March 3, 2013: …in the cool of the A & P, under the fluorescent lights, against all those stacked packages… (from John Updike’s “A&P”)

Accordingly, we must remain loyal to this art critic, continue to respect his Aufklarung yet remain savvy art appreciators by staying aware of the essay that sounds a bit meretricious. On the other hand you must give a nod to those men and women who are hoping for aesthetic anointment. Frequently they are sacrificing the potential of good salaries elsewhere; furthermore they are willing to provide other art-related services such as judging an art show or giving a talk on art at a civic organization. Imagine living your life as a local critic…..are you willing to give of your own time as the world waits with breathless anticipation over your critical contribution. Let’s make it easy….how about your view of some master’s retrospective at MOMA……easy huh…..anointed huh…..experienced huh …..Just as intelligent as the paid critic huh? Is the problem clear to you now? It is quite clear to me. So here’s the bottom line: male or female, art critics are usually a proud ego-driven lot who are convinced that their opinions are our tools to be used for our cultural growth. In fact, the true substance of fine art meaning is found safe and sound in this country’s fine art reservoir, in effect, its aesthetic backbone . Our critics provide insight and education as to the art they review, both historical and that which is being made even as we write.
We, as appreciators of our American art products need these devoted men and women for they are anointed by the arts gods (Terpsichore, Calliope and Euterpe) the many allegories and biographies which point to ancient big innings. No doubt there have been numerous art critics who have found solace in in their reminiscences of masterpieces. But critics have learned that such an experience is like the proverbial shooting star which presents itself for the world to see every 150 years or so. Therefore since few of them have been blessed with the daily aesthetic experience, we have the right I to find our peace in fine art. Need I say, there are few who really hope to achieve such a high goal and those who are may be seen as self-indulgent art freaks…..well, are you one those….one of us?
In the your opinion simply is not as influential as his because he has the job and you don’t. To give published art critics due respect for their years of experience (if so), thus considering their degrees from places of higher learning, their innate skill in defining the essence of the art and providing therein the worthwhile (contemporaneous only) legitimacy of their views on art. These opinions must then be considered within the framework of serious art. How does one receive such sanction enabling him to publish his or hers opinions?
Perhaps there are those individuals whose lives have been devoted to art criticism. as a result of no specific plan just serendipity in their lives which prepared them for the apparently enviable position. Others pay dearly with life’s gathering of credentials and sacrifices which enable him to proudly announce his position as a critic. Indeed there are few of them in America and the job doesn’t usually pay much but it is a proud endeavor and its rewards can be exceedingly worthwhile. In these Post-modern times the critic usually feels no obligation to clarify and explain his viewpoint to anyone whether they like it or not….the writer certainly wants to prove he has no connection to the artist or the publication for which he works. If asked pertinent questions he may or may not answer; yet, he defends himself saying his beliefs are neither dogmatic nor superficial, right? He is principled, right? And everyone should be able to perceive his unprecedented position , this unique connection with the infallible art gods in the sky ( when the stars are in the proper alignment our critic communes with his special milleu one far above collusion…he is a courageous fighter for truth in art….he reads Kant and loves the ideas of the Pre-Raphaelites ….he understands both Blake and Kandinsky? They are in fact far too subjective to explain in this essay. Instead, suffice it to state that this nation has produced a few outstanding art critics – art historians whose careers sparkle in the bright starlight of good taste and cautious critical opines as they judge the art se t before them. History applauds the thoughtful analysis of contributors such as Dunlap and Fielding while a devoted scholar like Belknap could not match his extraordinary art research with critiques because he lacked actual examples by which he might render opinions America has produced brilliant art writers such as Charles Caffin and intuitive art thinkers like Sadakichi Hartman and Fanny Butcher but there were few more willing to venture out on a limb than Samuel Isham.
It is a shame that space does not permit a comprehensive listing of great contributors to America’s annals of art criticism yet, it seems reasonable to generalize: America has produced some critics who stand head and shoulders above their European counterparts. The truth is that the American art crowd (including wealthy collectors) has made our great art treasures exceedingly valuable. A brilliant critic such as Norman Cantor or John Updike has helped provide our burgeoning art community with frameworks for insightful understanding of art, arguably our greatest national treasure. Who could not be impressed with our need for continued excellence in published art criticism in reading the words of the insightful explanations of Greenough in her writings on Stieglitz the all-time champion of American art?
“They (Stieglitz’s photographs) do not abandon the idea that photography could embody subjective expression. By contrasting the beauty of the skyscrapers with their unremitting growth, Stieglitz made the buildings symbolic not only of the continuous change of New York, but of change itself as a principle of all being.”

Richard H. Love, artist and art historian who intends no polysemy (not ever) in his own critical writings.

Library Loot

So as I wrote on my last (and first!) Library Loot, I hardly ever rent books at the library – and since that Loot was posted on January 18th, I think I have proved my point. However, I have been at the library several times in the meantime – just not to pick out books for myself. But today I did.

So one of my reading goals for this year, is to explore John Updike’s books a bit – that is, to read at least one novel by him. I’ve only read Terrorist and watched the movie version of The Witches of Eastwick so it’s about time to read some more of his works. Especially since I have been wanting to read his Rabbit books for years. So when the first one was available at the local library today, I grabbed it.

The last time I got books from the library, I got Jamrach’s Menagerie by Carol Birch – and I loved it. So when I saw Charlotte Rogan’s The Lifeboat, I had to get it. The part of Jamrach’s Menagerie I loved the most, was the ship wreck and what happened after – and this is an entire book about the aftermath of a ship wreck. I’ve also heard good things about it on the Guardian Book Podcast so I’m really looking forward to it.

And finally, as I wrote just the other day, I’m trying to be a better reader and blogger of Danish literature. And recently I read a very interesting review of Naja Marie Aidt’s first novel Sten Saks Papir (Rocks Paper Scissors). Aidt is a poet and supposedly she writes a beautiful poetic and lyrical language in this novel about how we each have our own perspective and have difficulties getting past this and how, for instance, one person experiences something as a rape, while the other person doesn’t. I am really excited about reading this and hope it lives up to my expectations.

So this was my library loot. Did you get any good books recently?

Related posts:

• Library Loot (Friday January 18th)

Read more:

• Naja Marie Aidt – Wikipedia (english)
• Sten, saks, papir – Aidt romandebuterer med smågenial undersøgelse af livet - review by Lilian Munk Rösing for Politiken

To young writers, I would merely say, “Try to develop actual work habits, and even though you have a busy life, try to reserve an hour or more a day to write.” Some very good things have been written on an hour a day… So, take it seriously and just set a quota.

Try to think of communicating with some ideal reader somewhere. Try to think of getting into print. Don’t be content just to call yourself a writer and then bitch about the crass publishing world that won’t run your stuff. We’re still a capitalist country, and writing to some degree is a capitalist enterprise, when it’s not a total sin to try to make a living and court an audience.

“Read what excites you,” would be my advice, and even if you don’t imitate it you will learn from it… I would like to think that in a country this large – and a language even larger – that there ought to be a living in it for somebody who cares, and wants to entertain and instruct a reader.

~ JOHN UPDIKE

Tao Lin perched on a mostly empty bookcase in his Murray Hill apartment. [via]

Photo Credit: Christopher R. Harris

Alice Walker at home in Jackson, Mississippi, 1977. [via]

Photo Credit: Slim Aarons

Truman Capote in his Brooklyn Heights apartment, 1958.

James Baldwin at home in Saint-Paul de Vence. [via]

Vladimir and Vera Nabokov, working at home. [via]

Photo Credit: George Leavens

Ernest Hemingway reading The New York Times in bed. [via]

Henry Miller in his home library in Big Sur. [via]

Photo Credit: Judy Linn

Patti Smith and Sam Shepard in her apartment in the early ’70s. [via]

Zora Neale Hurston working at her home in Brevard County, Florida. [via]

Photo Credit: Alfred J. Meyer

Mark Twain at home, 1903. [via]

Photo Credit: Man Ray

Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas in their apartment at 27 rue de Fleurus, Paris, 1922.

Agatha Christie reading and walking in Greenway, her English summer home.

Ralph Ellison at home. [via]

Rudyard Kipling in his study in Naulakha.

John Updike in his study in Ipswich, Massachusetts.

Photo Credit: Annie Leibovitz

Susan Sontag lolling about at home, 1993. [via]

Anne Sexton with her feet up at home.

Virginia Woolf outside her summer house with Maynard Keynes, Angelica Bell, Vanessa Bell, and Clive Bell, 1930s. [via]

F. Scott, Zelda, and Scottie Fitzgerald at Lands End, their home in Sands Point, NY, on Long Island Sound. [via]

Photo Credit: Jill Krementz

Donna Tartt at home with her pug, Pongo. [via]

Photo Credit: Larry Sultan

Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida at home in San Francisco. [via]

Paul Auster in his home in Park Slope. [via]

Photo Credit: Glenn Russell

Alison Bechdel in her home studio. [via]

Jorge Luis Borges in his bedroom.

Edward Gorey: at home, with cats. [via]

I began by asking [John] Updike whether the theology of Karl Barth had really sustained him through a difficult time in his life.

“I’ve certainly said that and it did seem to be true,” he said. “I fell upon Barth having exhausted Kierkegaard as a consoler, and having previously resorted to Chesterton. I discovered Barth through a series of addresses and lectures called The Word of God and the Word of Man. He didn’t attempt to play anybody’s game as far as looking at the Gospels as historic documents or anything. He just said, essentially, that this is a faith—take it or leave it. So yes, I did find Barth comforting, and a couple of my early novels—not so early, actually—are sort of Barthian. Rabbit Run certainly presents a Barthian point of view, from the standpoint of a Lutheran minister. And in Roger’s Version, Barthianism is about the only refuge for Roger from all the besieging elements that would deprive one of one’s faith—both science, which Dale tries to use on behalf of the theist point of view, and the watering down of theology with liberal values.”

“It’s interesting,” I said, “that some philosophers are so astonished and awed that anything at all should exist—like Wittgenstein, who said in the Tractatus that it’s not how the world is that is mystical, but that it is. And Heidegger, of course, made heavy weather of this too. He claimed that even people who never thought about why there is something rather than nothing were still ‘grazed’ by the question whether they realized it or not—say, in moments of boredom, when they’d just as soon that nothing at all existed, or in states of joy when everything is transfigured and they see the world anew, as if for the first time. Yet I’ve run into philosophers who don’t see anything very astonishing about existence. And in some moods I agree with them. The question Why is there something rather than nothing? sometimes seems vacuous to me. But in other moods it seems very very profound. How does it strike you? Have you ever spent much time brooding over it?”

“Well, to call it ‘brooding’ would be to dignify it,” Updike said. “But I am of the party that thinks that the existence of the world is a kind of miracle. It’s the last resort, really, of naturalistic theology. So many other props have been knocked out from under naturalistic theology—the first principle argument that Aristotle set forth, Aquinas’s prime mover … they’re all gone, but the riddle does remain: why is there something instead of nothing?”

I told Updike that I admired the way he had a character in Roger’s Version explain how the universe might have arisen from nothingness via a quantum-mechanical fluctuation. In the decades since he wrote the book, I added, physicists had come up with some very neat scenarios that would allow something to emerge spontaneously out of nothing in accordance with quantum laws. But then, of course, you’re faced with the mystery: Where are these laws written? And what gives them the power to command the void?

“Also, the laws amount to a funny way of saying, ‘Nothing equals something,’ ” Updike said, bursting into laughter. “QED! One opinion I’ve encountered is that, since getting from nothing to something involves time, and time didn’t exist before there was something, the whole question is a meaningless one that we should stop asking ourselves. It’s beyond our intellectual limits as a species. Put yourself into the position of a dog. A dog is responsive, shows intuition, looks at us with eyes behind which there is intelligence of a sort, and yet a dog must not understand most of the things it sees people doing. It must have no idea how they invented, say, the internal-combustion engine. So maybe what we need to do is imagine that we’re dogs and that there are realms that go beyond our understanding. I’m not sure I buy that view, but it is a way of saying that the mystery of being is a permanent mystery, at least given the present state of the human brain. I have trouble even believing—and this will offend you—the standard scientific explanation of how the universe rapidly grew from nearly nothing. Just think of it. The notion that this planet and all the stars we see, and many thousands of times more than those we see—that all this was once bounded in a point with the size of, what, a period or a grape? How, I ask myself, could that possibly be? And, that said, I sort of move on.”

Updike chuckled softly. His mood appeared to lighten.

“When you think about it,” he continued, “we rationalists—and we’re all, to an extent, rationalist—we accept propositions about the early universe which boggle the mind more than any of the biblical miracles do. Your mind can intuitively grasp the notion of a dead man coming back again to life, as people in deep comas do, and as we do when we wake up every morning out of a sound sleep. But to believe that the universe, immeasurably vast as it appears to be, was once compressed into a tiny space—into a tiny point—is in truth very hard to believe. I’m not saying I can disprove the equations that back it up. I’m just saying that it’s as much a matter of faith to accept that.”

Here I was moved to demur. The theories that imply this picture of the early universe—general relativity, the standard model of particle physics, and so forth—work beautifully at predicting our present-day observations. Even the theory of cosmic inflation, which admittedly is a bit conjectural, has been confirmed by the shape of the cosmic background radiation, as measured by the Hubble space telescope. If these theories are so good at accounting for the evidence we see at present, why shouldn’t we trust them as we extrapolate backward in time toward the beginning of the universe?

“I’m just saying I can’t trust them,” Updike replied. “My reptile brain won’t let me. It’s impossible to imagine that even the Earth was once compressed to the size of a pea, let alone the whole universe.”

Some things that are impossible to imagine, I pointed out, are quite easy to describe mathematically.

“Still,” Updike said, warming to the argument, “there have been other intricate systems in the history of mankind. The scholastics in the Middle Ages had a lot of intricacy in their intellectual constructions, and even the Ptolemaic epicycles or whatever were … Well, all of this showed a lot of intelligence, and theoretical consistency even, but in the end they collapsed. But, as you say, the evidence piles up. It’s been decades and decades since the standard model of physics was proposed, and it checks out to the twelfth decimal point. But this whole string theory business … There’s never any evidence, just mathematical formulas, right? There are men spending their whole careers working on a theory of something that might not even exist.”

Even so, I said, they’re doing some beautiful pure mathematics in the process.

“Beautiful in a vacuum!” Updike exclaimed. “What’s beauty if it’s not, in the end, true? Beauty is truth, and truth is beauty.”

I asked Updike if his own attitude toward natural theology was as contemptuous as Barth’s was. Some people think there’s a God because they have a religious experience. Some think there’s a God because they believe the priest. But others want evidence, evidence that will appeal to reason. And those are the people that natural theology, by showing how observations of the world around us might support the conclusion that there is a God, has the power to reach. Is Updike really willing to leave those people out in the cold just because he doesn’t like the idea of a God who lets himself be “intellectually trapped”?

Updike paused for a moment or two, then said, “I was once asked to be on a radio program called This I Believe. As a fiction writer, I really don’t like to formulate what I believe because, like a quantum phenomenon, it varies from day to day, and anyway there’s a sort of bad luck attached to expressing yourself too clearly. On this radio program I conceded that ruling out natural theology does leave too much of humanity and human experience behind. I suppose even a hardened Barthian might cling to at least one piece of natural theology, Christ’s saying, ‘By their fruits shall ye know them’—that so much of what we construe as virtue and heroism seems to come from faith. But to make faith into an abstract scientific proposition is to please no one, least of all the believers. There’s no intellectual exertion in accepting it. Faith is like being in love. As Barth put it, God is reached by the shortest ladder, not by the longest ladder. Barth’s constant point was that it is God’s movement that bridges the distance, not human effort.”

And why should God make that movement? Why should he have created a universe at all? I remembered Updike saying somewhere that God may have brought the world into being out of spiritual fatigue—that reality was a product of “divine acedia.” What, I asked him, could this possibly mean?

“Did I say that? God created the world out of boredom? Well, Aquinas said that God made the world ‘in play.’ In play. In a playful spirit he made the world. That, to me, seems closer to the truth.”

He was silent again for a moment, then continued. “Some scientists who are believers, like Freeman Dyson, have actually tackled the ultimate end of the universe. They’ve tried to describe a universe where entropy is almost total and individual particles are separated by distances that are greater than the dimensions of the present observable universe … an unthinkably dreary and pointless vacuum. I admire their scientific imagination, but I just can’t make myself go there. And a space like that is the space in which God existed and nothing else. Could God then have suffered boredom to the point that he made the universe? That makes reality seem almost a piece of light verse.”

What a lovely conceit! Reality is not a “blot on nothingness,” as Updike’s character Henry Bech had once, in a bilious moment, decided. It is a piece of light verse.

__________

From the chapter “The World as a Bit of Light Verse” in Jim Holt’s new book Why Does the World Exist?.

To anyone with an interest in this stuff, I’d urge you go pick up a copy of Holt’s book. As a complete scientific and philosophic diletente, I found it to be as readable and as luminous as any comparable text I’ve encountered.

In the book, Holt talks with philosophers, cosmologists, physicists, novelists, and other thinkers, confronting each with the question of Why? and receiving a slew of compelling conjectures in return. The overwhelming conclusion to be drawn, however, is that there is no discrete answer to that question; rational inquiry can run the gambit of inquiring words — Who, What, When, Where, How — but can do very little to demystify that monolithic query Why. We can lower our scientific and philosophical shoulders into that word all we want, but the universe doesn’t even bother to whisper back to us Why not?

Yet this fact is a great intellectual equalizer and the reason a book like this is intelligible to people like me. It’s also the reason why the conjectures of laymen like us are not that far off from the suppositions of esteemed intellectuals. As Holt says in one chapter:

“When you listen to such thinkers feel their way around the question of why there is a world at all, you begin to realize that your own thoughts on the matter are not quite so nugatory as you had imagined. No one can confidently claim intellectual superiority in the face of the mystery of existence. For, as William James observed, ‘All of us are beggars here.’”

To James’s observation I’d add the one enshrined as Oscar Wilde’s epitaph, “We’re all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars,” a favorite quote of mine and an uncharacteristically tentative utterance from a man so noted for his florid, grandiose phrase-making.

Furthermore, to Updike’s analogy of the dog, I would add the more elegant image proposed by Einstein:

“We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn’t know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see the universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws but only dimly understand these laws. Our limited minds grasp the mysterious force that moves the constellations.”

This metaphor is at once superior and inferior to that of Updike. It’s superior because a dog — like everything else we know of in the universe — does not possess reflexive self-awareness, at least not in any robust sense.

However, as Holt’s book lays out, the universe is not arranged like a library wherein we effortlessly extract particular quantities to isolate and examine. Instead, the scientific method approaches the universe at its corners and wrinkles, gleaning what limited information we can from a cosmos shrouded in shady Higgs bosons, almost-invisible neutrinos, and inconsistent classes of elementary particles.

In this sense, we are more like canines ogling at an internal combustion engine, given that the object we are investigating (the universe) is not laid out to be reverse-engineered. It is not designed, as a book is, to easily reveal its secrets to us.

Increasingly, Don Fairbairn had trouble remembering how it had actually been in the broad middle stretch of his life, when he was living with his first wife and helping her, however distractedly, raise their children. His second marriage, which had once seemed so shiny and amazing and new, now was as old as his first had been–twenty-two years, exactly–when he had, one ghastly weekend, left it. His second wife and he lived in a house much too big for them yet so full of souvenirs and fragile inherited treasures that they could not imagine living elsewhere. In their present circle of friends, the main gossip was of health and death, whereas once the telephone wires had buzzed with word of affairs and divorces. His present wife, Vanessa, would set down the telephone to announce that Herbie Edgerton’s cancer had come back and appeared to be into his lymph nodes and bones now; thirty years ago, his first wife, Alissa, would hang up and ask him if they were free for drinks and take-out pizza at the Langleys’ this Saturday. Yes, she would go on, it was such short notice that it would have been rude from anybody but the Langleys. They were socially voracious, now that psychotherapy had helped them to see that they couldn’t stand each other. Everybody’s mental and marital health, as Don remembered it, was frail, so frail that women, meeting, would follow their “How are you?” with “No, how are you really?”

And then–this with an averted glance and the hint of a blush from Alissa–she had seen Wendy Chace in the superette and impulsively asked her and Jim to drinks tomorrow evening. She had said yes, they’d love to, but they couldn’t stay more than a minute, Jim had the Planning Commission meeting, they were fending off this evil out-of-state developer who was trying to turn the entire old Burgoyne estate into Swiss-chalet-style condos. Just paraphrasing Jim’s flighty, cause-minded wife made Alissa glow. This at least was vivid in Don’s memory, the way his former wife’s eyes would become livelier and her cheeks, a bit sallow normally, would turn pink and her lips, usually pursed and pensive, would dance into quips and laughter when Jim was near or in prospect. He couldn’t blame her; he had been as bad as she, looking outside the home for strength to keep the home going. The formula had worked only up to a point–perhaps the point, somewhere in their forties, when they realized that life wasn’t endless. The Fairbairns had been, actually, among the last in their old set to get divorced. They had stayed on the sinking ship while its deck tilted and its mast splintered and its sails flapped, whipping loose line everywhere.

A teetotaller now (weight, liver, conflicting pills), Don could remember the drinks–drinks on porches and docks, on boats and lawns, in living rooms and kitchens and dens. The high metallic sheen of gin, the slightly more viscid transparency of vodka, the grain-golden huskiness of bourbon, the paler, caustic timbre of Scotch, the sprig of mint, the slice of orange, the chunk of lime, the column of beer with its rising flutes of bubbles, the hemispheres of white and red wine floating above the table on their invisible stems, the little sticky-rimmed glasses of anisette and Cointreau and B & B and green Chartreuse that followed dinner, whirling the minutes toward midnight, while the more prudent, outsiderish guests peeked at their watches, thinking of the babysitter and tomorrow’s sickly-sweet headache. Don remembered, from the viewpoint of a host, the magnanimous crunch of ice cubes broken out of their aluminum trays with an authoritative yank of the divider lever, and the pantry’s round-shouldered array of half-gallon bottles from the liquor mart beside the superette, the cost of liquor a kind of dues you cheerfully paid for membership in the unchartered club of young couples. How curiously filling and adequate it was, the constant society of the same dozen or so people. Western frontiersmen, Don remembered reading somewhere, said of buffalo meat that, strange to say, you never tired of eating it. The Fairbairns’ friends would arrive for weekday drinks at six, harried and mussed, children in tow–the women bedraggled by a day of housework, the men fresh off the train with their city pallor–and be slowly transformed into ebullient charmers. Become dizzyingly confiding and glamorous and intimes, they would not leave much before eight, when the time had long passed to get the children, who had been devouring potato chips and Fig Newtons around the kitchen television, decently fed and into bed.

“How did you and Mom do it?” Don’s sons and daughters asked him, with genuine admiration, of his old servantless four-child household. His children as they homed in on forty lived in city apartments or virtually gated New Jersey enclaves, with one or two children of their own whose nurture and protection required daily shifts of women of color–tag-team caregivers, one to achieve the dressing and the administration of breakfast and safe passage to nursery school, and another to supervise the evening meal and bath and bedtime video. Nevertheless, his daughters were exhausted by motherhood, which had come to them late, as a bit of progenitive moonlighting incidental to their thriving professional careers; conception had been rife with psychic tension and childbirth fraught with peril. His sons spoke solemnly, apprehensively to him about the education of their children and, even more remote, the job prospects available to these toddlers in the year 2020. They both, his two sons, performed some inscrutable monkey-business among computers and equities, and they thought in long-range demographic curves. Don had to laugh, being interviewed by them as a kind of pioneer, a survivor of a mythical age of domesticity, when giant parents strode the earth. “You were there,” he reminded them. “You remember how it was. Our key concept was benign neglect.” But they would not be put off and, indeed, half persuaded him that he had been an epic family man, chopping forests into cabins amid the wilderness of the baby boom.

Tracking their own children’s progress, they asked him how old they had been when they first crawled, walked, talked, and read, and he was embarrassed to say that he could not remember. “Ask your mother,” he told them.

“She says she doesn’t remember, either. She says we were all wonderfully normal.”

An only child, born in the Depression, Don had been honored at his birth with the purchase of a big white book, its padded cover proudly embossed Baby’s Book, in which pages printed in dove-colored ink waited for the entry of his early achievements and the dates thereof. July 20, 1935. Donald took his first step. A shaky one. September 6, 1938. Off to kindergarten! Donny clung and clung. Heartbreaking. He was surprised to discover that his mother, in that little curly backward-slanting hand that seemed to his eyes the very distillation of methodical maternity, had entered everything up through his various graduations and his first wedding; she had noted her first two grandchildren but had not bothered with the second two or with his second nuptials. How odd it is, he thought, that America’s present prosperity, based upon our outworking the Germans and the Japanese, has produced the same pinched, anxiously cherishing families as the Depression. His children’s individual developments had become in his failing mind an amiable tangle while he daily dined on the social equivalent of buffalo meat.

The lack of recall almost frightened him. Did he help the kids with their homework? He must have. Did he and Alissa ever go grocery shopping together? He had no image of it. The beds, how had they got made, and the meals, how had they got onto the table for twenty-two years? Alissa must have done it all, somehow, while he was reading the sports page. Having the babies, now such a momentous rite of New Age togetherness and unembarrassed body-worship, was something else she had done alone, in the hospital, without complication or much complaint afterwards. The baby just appeared in a basket beside her bed, or at her breast, and in a few days he drove the two of them home, two where there had been one, a doubling of persons like a magic trick whose secret was too quick for the eye. The last childbirth, Don did remember, came on a winter midnight, and the obstetrician, awakened, had swung by in his car for her, and she had looked up smiling from the snowy street, like a Christmas caroller, and disappeared into the doctor’s two-tone Buick. Left alone with the residue of their children, he had been jittery, he remembered, and convinced that a burglar or crazed invader, sensing his family’s moment of being vulnerably torn asunder, was in the big creaky house with him; Don had fallen asleep only after taking a golf club–a three-iron, in preference to a slower-swinging wood–into bed with him, for protection.

He tried to picture Alissa with a vacuum cleaner and couldn’t, though he remembered himself, in the dining room of the first house they had lived in, wielding a wallpaper steamer, pressing the big square pan against the wall for a minute or two and stripping the paper with a broad putty knife and, in drenched shorts and T-shirt, wading through curling wet sheets of faded silver flowers. Once a week, in that same room, she would serve flank steak, it came to him, the brown meat nicely tucked around a core of peppery stuffing, and the whole platter, garnished with parsley and little red-skinned potatoes, redolent of bygone home economics, of those touching Fifties-born culinary ambitions that sought to perpetuate a sense of the family meal as a pious ceremony heavy with female labor. All those meals slavishly served, and in the end he had dismissed her like a redundant servant. Vanessa and he, with no children to feed, had become grazers, snackers, eaters-out, sometimes taking their evening meal separately, gobbling from microwave-safe containers while Peter Jennings injected his personal warmth into the news. She still had a fondness for pizza, hot or cold.

“But what did you do about sleep? About children waking up all night?” the elder of his hard-working daughters, with tender blue shadows beneath her eyes, persisted.

“You all slept through, virtually from birth,” he told her, suspecting he was Iying but unable to locate the truth of it. There had been a child whimpering about an earache and falling asleep with the hurting ear pressed against the heat of a fresh-ironed dish towel. But was this himself as a child? He could not remember Alissa with an iron in her hand. He did remember getting up from bed in the pit of night and bringing a squalling armful of protoplasm back to bed and handing it to its mother, who was already sitting up with her nightie straps lowered, her bare chest shining. He would go back to sleep to the sound of tiny lips sucking, little feet softly kicking. He had been the baby, it seemed. Yet no social workers came to the door to rescue his children from abuse, no neighbors complained to the authorities, the children waited for the school bus dressed like the others–like little clowns in the space-age outfits of synthetic fabrics decades removed from the dark woollens, always damp, that he himself had worn–and ascended more or less smoothly through the passages of school and, like smart bombs, found colleges and mates and jobs, so he must have been an adequate parent and householder. “It frightens me,” Don confessed to his daughter, “how little I remember.”

The Saturday afternoons of it all, the masculine feats of maintenance, the changing of the storm windows to screens, the cellar workbench where spiders built webs across the clutter of rusting tools. The heating, electricity, telephone, and water bills–he could not see himself writing a single check, but he must have written many, all cashed, cancelled, and stored in Alissa’s attic, along with the slides, the scrapbooks, the school reports and tinted school photographs that had accumulated over twenty-two years of days, each with its ups and downs, its mishaps, its sniffles, its excited tales told by children venturing toward adulthood, through a world that on every side was new to them. Don had lost the anatomy. He was like an astronomer before the Voyagers, before the Hubble telescope, working with blurs. He remembered being in love with one or another man’s wife, getting drunk after dinner, telling Alissa to go to bed, and playing over and over again “Born to Lose,” by Ray Charles, or maybe it was the Supremes’ “Stop! in the Name of Love!,” lifting the player arm from the LP repeatedly to regroove the band, and being told with a shy smile the next morning by his older son, “You sure listened to that song a lot last night.” The curtains for a moment parted; there was a second of shamed focus. His son’s bedroom was above the den where Don had sat mired in himself and the revolving grooves. He had kept the boy, who had to get up for school, awake.

And what of his girls’ dating, that traditional tragicomedy, with its overtones of Attic patricide, in the age of the sitcom? His older daughter had gone off to boarding school when she was fifteen, and his younger daughter had been but twelve when he left the house. He could scarcely remember a single hot-rod swerving into the crackling driveway to carry off one of his trembling virgins.

Now this younger daughter invited him to have drinks on a boat. He didn’t have to drink liquor, of course, she explained. More and more people didn’t; it interfered with their training routines. She herself was slim and hard as a greyhound, and entered local marathons; her hair, which like Alissa’s had begun to turn white early, was cut short as a boy’s, to lower wind resistance, he supposed. The deal was this, Dad: the husband of a friend of theirs was turning forty, and she, the wife, was giving him as one of his presents a sunset cruise in the marshes, and since his parents were coming the friend, the wife–are you following this, Dad?–wanted some other members of the older generation to be there, so the question is could you and Vanessa come, since you know I guess the husband’s father from apparently playing a few golf tournaments with him?

Actually, when he shook his peer’s hand, under the canopy of the flat-bottomed cruise boat, he remembered him as an Opponent who had illegally switched balls on the eighteenth green and then sunk the putt to win the match. At the time, he hadn’t wished to undergo the social embarrassment of complaining to the officials, but he had avoided club tournaments ever since. Now the man–one of those odious exultant retirees with a face creased and thickened by an all-year tan–crowed over that remembered triumph. His wife, who was somewhat younger than he, and preeningly dressed in clothes that would have appeared less garish in Florida, fastened onto Vanessa as her only soulmate. Don drifted away, trying to hide among the drinking young couples, to whom he had nothing to say. Not drinking did that–it robbed you of things to say.

How strange it was to be once more at a party where the women were still menstruating. Lean, smart, they moved and twittered and struck poses with an electricity like that in silent movies, which look speeded-up. The men in their checked jackets and pastel slacks were boyish and broad–relatively clumsy foils for their wives’ animation, which in the shuffle of the party kept sprouting new edges, abrupt new angles of slightly startled loveliness. Don inhaled, as if to extract from the salt air the scent of their secretions, their secrets. It had been at parties like this that he had gotten to know Vanessa Langley, her and her socially voracious husband. The similarity of her name to Alissa’s had been one of the attractions; she would be a wife with a “v” added, for vim and vigor, for vivacity and vagina and victory. He had fallen in love with her, she had fallen with him, and here they were, on board together, more than twenty years later.

The boat trundled, with its burden of canned music and clinking drinks and celebrating couples, out through the winding channel between the black-mud banks of the golden-green marsh toward the wider water, where islands crammed with shingled summer houses slowly changed position, starboard to port, as the captain put his craft through a scenic half-circle. There was a white lighthouse, and a stunning sunstruck slope where some American grandee of old had decreed a symmetrical pattern of trimmed shrubs like a great ideogram, and a marina whose pale masts stood as thick as wheat, and a nappy blue-green far stretch of wooded land miraculously yet undeveloped, and the eastward horizon of the open sea already darkening to receive its first starlight while the undulating land to the west basked under luminous salmon stripes, the remnants of daylight. Don silently gazed outward at all this, and his fellow-passengers gave it moments of notice, but the main thrust of their attention was inward, toward each other, in bright and gnashing conversations growing shrill as the drinks sank in, a feast of love drowning out the canned music. That was how it was, how it had been, the living moment awash with beauty ignored in the quest for a better moment, slightly elsewhere, with some slightly differing other, while the weeds grew in the peony beds, and dust balls gathered beneath the sofa, and the children, unobserved, plotted their own escapes, their own elsewheres.

A few children had come along with their parents and, after being admonished not to fall overboard, fended for themselves. To one boy, rapt beside him at the rail, Don on the homeward swing pointed out a headland and a rosy mansion whose name he knew, beyond the marsh grasses now drinking in darkness as the tide slipped away from their roots. Vanessa, on the drive home, volunteered, “The birthday boy’s father’s wife and I have a number of mutual acquaintances, it turned out. She said an old college roommate of mine, Angela Hart, just had a double mastectomy.”

Don thought of confiding in turn how magically strange he had found it to be again among fertile women, with all the excitement that bred. He might in his youthful cruelty have once said something like this to Alissa–anything to get her to respond, to get the blood flowing–but between Vanessa and him there had come to prevail the tact of two cripples, linked victims of time.

from randomhouse

Sinclair Lewis is king of the second 100, with four books. Here he is on the cover of Time Magazine, 15 years after winning the Nobel Prize, yet now he is mostly forgotten or ignored. Have you ever read anything by him?

This list works a bit differently than the Top 100.  First of all, this is not a ranked list.  Except for the first three listed titles, they are placed on this list chronologically.  Second, I have not been back through each one of these titles the way I have gone through the Top 100.  Some of these I haven’t re-read in years while every one of the Top 100 were re-read before I wrote on them.  There won’t be individual posts on these books.  Think of this list as less the definitive second 100 as 100 great novels that are worth a read.

Don’t mistake me.  These aren’t just books I enjoy reading.  I hope to start a series soon called Great Reads (which will all get individual posts), which are all about the books I really enjoy, but that don’t really belong on a list like this one, let alone the Top 100.  These are all great novels (though some might also end up in Great Reads).

What about your book, the one you were surprised didn’t make the Top 100 and are even more surprised didn’t make this list?  Well, I had to pare it down (I originally typed out over 125 novels and considered far more).  Just imagine that whatever book you’re thinking of that didn’t make the list was one of the last ones I cut.  Well, unless your book is Infinite Jest, Middlemarch, On the Road or anything by Jane Austen or Henry James.  If you thought those might ever make the list you have clearly never read anything else I have ever posted on literature and are probably brand new to the site.  Welcome!

Now, as for those first three titles.  Well, I made the decision not to re-approach my list while in the process of doing these posts (of course I didn’t know it would take over three years to get the whole list done).  Because of that, sometimes things come up that I realized belonged on the list.  The first of them was something I had somehow never read and as soon as I read it (mid-2011), I realized it should have been on the list.  The second was one I went back and re-read in the summer of 2012 after re-watching the film with Veronica and I realized I had long under-estimated it and it should have been on the list.  The third of them I have the best excuse for – it hadn’t even been written when I did the list.  But it belongs on it.  So those are the de facto other Top 100 books.

the big 3:

• The Return of the Native  (Thomas Hardy, 1878)
  • “A Saturday afternoon in November was approaching the time of twilight, and the vast tract of unenclosed wild known as Egdon Heath embrowned itself moment by moment.”
• East of Eden  (John Steinbeck, 1952)
  • “The Salinas Valley is in Northern California.”
• The Tiger’s Wife  (Tea Obreht, 2011)
  • “In my earliest memory, my grandfather is bald as a stone and he takes me to see the tigers.”

the other 97:

• Frankenstein  (Mary Shelley, 1818)
  • “To Mrs. Saville, England, St. Petersburgh, Dec. 11th, 17–, You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings.”
• The Red and the Black  (Stendhal, 1830)
  • “The little town of Verrières is one of the prettiest in Franche-Comté.”
• Notre-Dame de Paris  (Victor Hugo, 1831)
  • “It is three hundred forty-eight years, six months, and nineteen days ago today that the citizens of Paris were awakened by the pealing of all the bells in the triple precincts of the City, the University, and the Town.”
• Nicholas Nickleby  (Charles Dickens, 1839)
  • “There once lived, in a sequestered part of the country of Devonshire, one Mr. Godfrey Nickleby: a worthy gentleman, who, taking it into his head rather late in life that must get married, and not being young enough or rich enough to aspire to the hand of a lady of fortune, had wedded an old flame out of mere attachment, who in her turn had taken him for the same reason.”
• The Three Musketeers  (Alexandre Dumas, 1844)
  • “On the first Monday of April, 1625, the market town of Meung, birthplace of the author of the Roman de la Rose, seemed to be in as great a turmoil as if the Huguenots had come to turn it into a second La Rochelle.”
• The Count of Monte Cristo  (Alexandre Dumas, 1846)
  • “On the 24th of February, 1815, the lookout of Notre-Dame de la Garde signalled the three-master, the Pharaon, from Smyrna, Trieste, and Naples.”
• Madame Bovary  (Gustave Flaubert, 1857)
  • “We were in class when the head-master came in, followed by a ‘new fellow,’ not wearing the school uniform, and a school servant carrying a large desk.”
• Notes from Underground  (Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1864)
  • “I am a sick man . . . I am a wicked man.”
• The Mayor of Casterbridge  (Thomas Hardy, 1886)
  • “One evening of late summer, before the present century had reached its thirtieth year, a young man and woman, the latter carrying a child, were approaching the large village of Weydon-Priors, in Upper Wessex, on foot.”
• The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde  (Robert Louis Stevenson, 1886)
  • “Mr. Utterson the lawyer was a man of a rugged countenance that was never lighted by a smile; cold, scanty and embarrassed in discourse; backward in sentiment; lean, long, dusty, dreary and yet somehow lovable.”
• A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court  (Mark Twain, 1889)
  • “It was in Warwick Castle that I came across the curious stranger who I am going to talk about.”
• La Bête Humaine  (Emila Zola, 1890)
  • “Roubaud came into the room and put the pound loaf, pâté and bottle of white wine on the table.”
• The Picture of Dorian Gray  (Oscar Wilde, 1891)
  • “The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.”
• Jude the Obscure  (Thomas Hardy, 1895)
  • “The schoolmaster was leaving the village, and everybody seemed sorry.”
• The Red Badge of Courage  (Stephen Crane, 1895)
  • “The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting.”
• The Awakening  (Kate Chopin, 1899)
  • “A green and yellow parrot, which hung in a cage outside the door, kept repeating over and over: ‘Allez, vous-en! Allez vous-en!  Sapristi!  That’s all right!’“
• Lord Jim  (Joseph Conrad, 1900)
  • “He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built, and he advanced straight at you with a slight stoop of the shoulders, head forward, and a fixed from-under stare which made you think of a charging bull.”
• Sister Carrie  (Theodore Dreiser, 1900)
  • “When Caroline Meeber boarded the afternoon train for Chicago, her total outfit consisted of a small trunk, a cheap imitation alligator-skin satchel, a small lunch in a paper box, and a yellow leather snap-purse, containing her ticket, a scrap of paper with her sister’s address in Van Buren Street, and four dollars of money.”
• The Hound of the Baskervilles  (Arthur Conan Doyle, 1902)
  • “Mr. Sherlock Holmes, who was usually very late in the mornings, save upon those not infrequent occasions when he was up all night, was seated at the breakfast table.”
• The Secret Agent  (Joseph Conrad, 1907)
  • “Mr. Verloc, going out in the morning, left his shop nominally in charge of his brother-in-law.”
• A Room with a View  (E. M. Forster, 1908)
  • “‘The Signora had no business to do it,’ said Miss Bartlett, ‘no business at all.’”
• The Wind in the Willows  (Kenneth Grahame, 1908)
  • “The Mole had been working very hard all the morning, spring-cleaning his little home.”
• The Rainbow  (D. H. Lawrence, 1915)
  • “The Brangwens had lived for generations on the Marsh Farm, in the meadows where the Erewash twisted sluggishly through alder trees, separating Derbyshire from Nottinghamshire.”
• The Magnificent Ambersons  (Booth Tarkington, 1918)
  • “Major Amberson had ‘made a fortune’ in 1873, when other people were losing fortunes, and the magnificence of the Ambersons began then.”
• The Age of Innocence  (Edith Wharton, 1920)
  • “On a January evening of the early seventies, Christine Nilsson was singing in Faust at the Academy of Music in New York.”
• Main Street  (Sinclair Lewis, 1920)
  • “On a hill by the Mississippi where Chippewas camped two generations ago, a girl stood in relief against the cornflower blue of Northern sky.”
• Babbitt  (Sinclair Lewis, 1922)
  • “The towers of Zenith aspired above the morning mist; austere towers of steel and cement and limestone, sturdy as cliffs and delicate as silver rods.”
• The Good Soldier Švejk  (Jaroslav Hašek, 1923)
  • ” ‘And so they’ve killed our Ferdinand,’ said the charwoman to Mr Švejk, who had left military service years before, after having been finally certified by an army medical board as an imbecile, and now lived by selling dogs – ugly, mongrel monstrosities whose pedigrees he forged.”
• The Bridge of San Luis Rey  (Thornton Wilder, 1927)
  • “On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travellers into the gulf below.”
• Elmer Gantry  (Sinclair Lewis, 1927)
  • “Elmer Gantry was drunk.”
• Lady Chatterley’s Lover  (D. H. Lawrence, 1928)
  • “Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically.”
• Dodsworth  (Sinclair Lewis, 1929)
  • “The aristocracy of Zenith were dancing at the Kennepoose Canoe Club.”
• A Farewell to Arms  (Ernest Hemingway, 1929)
  • “In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains.”
• A Handful of Dust  (Evelyn Waugh, 1934)
  • ” ‘Was anyone hurt?’ “
• Tender is the Night  (F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1934)
  • “On the pleasant shore of the French Riviera, about half way between Marseilles and the Italian border, stands a large, proud, rose-colored hotel.”
• I Claudius / Claudius the God  (Robert Graves, 1934, 1935)
  • “I, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus This-that-and-the-other (for I shall not trouble you yet with all my titles) who was once, and not so long ago either, known to my friends and relatives and associates as ‘Claudius the Idiot’, or ‘That Claudius’, or ‘Claudius the Stammerer’ or ‘Clau-Clau-Claudius’ or at best as ‘Poor Uncle Claudius’, am now about to write this strange history of my life; starting from my earliest childhood and continuing year by year until I reach the fateful point of change where, some eight years ago, at the age of fifty-one, I suddenly found myself caught in what I may call the ‘golden predicament’ from which I have never since become disentangled.”
• Of Mice and Men  (John Steinbeck, 1937)
  • “A few miles south of Soledad, the Salinas River drops in close to the hillside bank and runs deep and green.”
• Brighton Rock  (Graham Greene, 1938)
  • “Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him.”
• Scoop  (Evelyn Waugh, 1938)
  • “While still a young man, John Courteney Boot had, as his publisher proclaimed, ‘achieved an assured and enviable position in contemporary letters.’ “
• The Big Sleep  (Raymond Chandler, 1939)
  • “It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills.”
• The Day of the Locust  (Nathanael West, 1939)
  • “Around quitting time, Tod Hackett heard a great din on the road outside his office.”
• The Power and the Glory  (Graham Greene, 1940)
  • “Mr Tench went out to look for his ether cylinder, into the blazing Mexican sun and the bleaching dust.”
• Brideshead Revisited  (Evelyn Waugh, 1945)
  • “When I reached ‘C’ Company lines, which were at the top of the hill, I paused and look back at the camp, just coming into full view below me through the grey mist of early morning.”
• All the King’s Men  (Robert Penn Warren, 1946)
  • “Mason City.”
• Under the Volcano  (Malcolm Lowry, 1947)
  • “Two mountain chaines traverse the republic roughly from north to south, forming between them a number of valleys and plateaux.”
• The Naked and the Dead  (Norman Mailer, 1948)
  • “Nobody could sleep.”
• From Here to Eternity  (James Jones, 1951)
  • “When he finished packing, he walked out on to the third-floor porch of the barracks brushing the dust from his hands, a very neat and deceptively slim young man in the summer khakis that were still early morning fresh.”
• Wise Blood  (Flannery O’Connor, 1952)
  • “Hazel Motes sat at a forward angle on the green plush train seat, looking one minute at the window, as if he might want to jump out of it, and the next down the aisle at the other end of the car.”
• The Adventures of Augie March  (Saul Bellow, 1953)
  • “I am an American, Chicago born – Chicago, that somber city – and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent known, sometimes a not so innocent.”
• The Last Hurrah  (Edwin O’Connor, 1956)
  • “It was early in August when Frank Skeffington decided – or rather, announced his decision, which actually had been arrived at some months before – to run for re-election as mayor of the city.”
• Seize the Day  (Saul Bellow, 1956)
  • “When it came to concealing his troubles, Tommy Wilhelm was not less capable than the next fellow.”
• The Temple of the Golden Pavilion  (Yukio Mishima, 1956)
  • “Ever since my childhood, Father had often spoken to me about the Golden Temple.”
• The Wapshot Chronicles  (John Cheever, 1957, 1964)
  • “St. Botolphs was an old place, an old river town.”
• The Poorhouse Fair  (John Updike, 1959)
  • ” ‘What’s this?’ “
• To Kill a Mockingbird  (Harper Lee, 1960)
  • “When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.”
• One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich  (Alexander Solzhenitsyn, 1962)
  • “At five o’clock that morning reveille was sounded, as usual, by the blows of a hammer on a length of rail hanging up near the staff quarters.”
• Dune  (Frank Herbert, 1965)
  • “In the week before their departure to Arrakis, when all the final scurrying about had reached a nearly unbearable frenzy, an old crone came to visit the mother of the boy, Paul.”
• The Painted Bird  (Jerzy Kosinski, 1965)
  • “In the first weeks of World War II, in the fall of 1939, a six-year-old boy from a large city in Eastern Europe was sent by his parents, like thousands of other children, to the shelter of a distant village.”
• Couples  (John Updike, 1968)
  • ” ‘What did you make of the new couple?’ “
• True Grit  (Charles Portis, 1968)
  • “People do not give it credence that a fourteen-year-old girl could leave home and go off in the wintertime to avenge her father’s blood but it did not seem so strange then, although I will say it did not happen every day.”
• Them  (Joyce Carol Oates, 1969)
  • “One warm evening in August 1937 a girl in love stood before a mirror.”
• Flags in the Dust  (William Faulkner, 1973)
  • “Old man Falls roared: ‘Cunnel was settin’ thar in a cheer, his sock feet propped on the po’ch railin, smokin’ this hyer very pipe.’ “
• The Great American Novel  (Philip Roth, 1973)
  • “Call me Smitty.”
• Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy  (John Le Carré, 1974)
  • “The truth is, if old Major Dover hadn’t dropped dead at Taunton races Jim would never have come to Thursgood’s at all.”
• Ragtime  (E. L. Doctorow, 1975)
  • “In 1902 Father built a house at the crest of the Broadview Avenue hill in New Rochelle, New York.”
• The Book of Laughter and Forgetting  (Milan Kundera, 1978)
  • “In February 1948, the Communist leader Klement Gottwald stepped out on the balcony of a Baroque palace in Prague to harangue hundreds of thousands of citizens massed in Old Town Square.”
• Chronicle of a Death Foretold  (Gabriel García Márquez, 1982)
  • “On the day they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar got up at five-thirty in the morning to wait for the boat the bishop was coming on.”
• The Color Purple  (Alice Walker, 1982)
  • “You better not never tell nobody but God.”
• The House of the Spirits  (Isabel Allende, 1982)
  • “Barrabás came to us by the sea, the child Clara wrote in her delicate calligraphy.”
• Shoeless Joe  (W.P. Kinsella, 1982)
  • “My father said he saw him years later playing in a tenth-rate commercial league in a textile town in Carolina, wearing shoes and an assumed name.”
• Shame  (Salman Rushdie, 1983)
  • “In the remote border town of Q., which when seen from the air resembles nothing so much as an ill-proportioned dumb-bell, there once lived three lovely, and loving, sisters.”
• Love Medicine  (Louise Erdrich, 1984)
  • “The morning before Easter Sunday, June Kashpaw was walking down the clogged main street of oil boomtown Williston, North Dakota, killing time before the noon bus arrived that would take her home.”
• The Cider House Rules  (John Irving, 1985)
  • “In the hospital of the orphanage – the boys’ division at St. Cloud’s, Maine – two nurses were in charge of naming the new babies and checking that their little penises were healing from the obligatory circumcision.”
• The Handmaid’s Tale  (Margaret Atwood, 1985)
  • “We slept in what had once been the gymnasium.”
• Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World  (Haruki Murakami, 1985)
  • “The elevator continued its impossibly slow ascent.”
• Perfume: The Story of a Murderer  (Patrick Suskind, 1985)
  • “In eighteenth-century France there lived a man who was one of the most gifted and abominable personages in an era that knew no lack of gifted and abominable personages.”
• White Noise  (Don DeLillo, 1985)
  • “The station wagons arrived at noon, a long shining line that coursed through the west campus.”
• Tracks  (Louise Erdrich, 1988)
  • “We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall.”
• L.A. Confidential  (James Ellroy, 1990)
  • “An abandoned auto court in the San Berdoo foothills; Buzz Meeks checked in with ninety-four thousand dollars, eighteen pounds of high-grade heroin, a 10-gauge pump, a .38 special, a .45 automatic and a switchblade he’d bought off a pachuco at the border – right before he spotted the car parked across the line: Mickey Cohen goons in an LAPD unmarked, Tijuana cops standing by the bootjack a piece of his goodies, dump his body in the San Yisdro River.”
• The Sweet Hereafter  (Russell Banks, 1991)
  • “A dog – it was a dog I saw for certain.”
• The English Patient  (Michael Ondaatje, 1992)
  • “She stands up in the garden where she has been working and looks into the distance.”
• Nobody’s Fool  (Richard Russo, 1993)
  • “Upper Main Street in the village of North Bath, just above the town’s two-block-long business district, was quietly residential for three more bocks, then became even more quietly rural along old Route 27A, a serpentine two-lane blacktop that snaked its way through the Adirondacks of northern New York, with their tiny, down-at-the-heels resort towns, all the way to Montreal and prosperity.”
• Sabbath’s Theater  (Philip Roth, 1995)
  • “Either forswear fucking others or the affair is over.”
• American Pastoral  (Philip Roth, 1997)
  • “The Swede.”
• Straight Man  (Richard Russo, 1997)
  • “Truth be told, I’m not an easy man.”
• The Hours  (Michael Cunningham, 1998)
  • “She hurries from the house, wearing a coat too heavy for the weather.”
• The Blind Assassin  (Margaret Atwood, 2000)
  • “Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge.”
• Bel Canto  (Ann Patchett, 2001)
  • “When the lights went off the accompanist kissed her.”
• The Corrections  (Jonathan Franzen, 2001)
  • “The madness of an autumn prairie cold front coming through.”
• Middlesex  (Jeffrey Eugenides, 2002)
  • “I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.”
• Out Stealing Horses  (Per Petterson, 2003)
  • “Early November.”
• The History of Love  (Nicole Krauss, 2005)
  • “When they write my obituary.”
• No Country for Old Men  (Cormac McCarthy, 2005)
  • “I sent one boy to the gaschamber at Huntsville.”
• Shalimar the Clown  (Salman Rushdie, 2005)
  • “At twenty-four the ambassador’s daughter slept badly through the warm, unsurprising nights.”
• Freedom  (Jonathan Franzen, 2010)
  • “The news about Walter Bergulund wasn’t picked up locally – he and Patty had moved away to Washington two years earlier and meant nothing to St. Paul now – but the urban gentry of Ramsey Hill were not so loyal to their city as not to read the New York Times.”
• The Imperfectionists  (Tom Rachman, 2010)
  • “Lloyd shoves off the bedcovers and hurries to the front door in white underwear and black socks.”
• The Night Circus  (Erin Morgenstern, 2011)
  • “The circus arrives without warning.”

i know, i know, i just posted a sapfest several weeks ago about how happy and in love i am, so where could this possibly be going? well: regardless of whether i’m single or in a relationship, when february rolls around, i get this feeling of oh-god-i’m-being-forced-into-something-against-my-will-and-the-expectations-are-unattainably-high-and-i-have-no-say-in-this-whatsoever. the anxiety over what this holiday should/could be gets to me every time.

“today is a holiday invented by greeting card companies to make people feel like crap.” -eternal sunshine of the spotless mind

it would be way more romantic if your someone, may it be your partner, or your crush of the day – your significant so-and-so, as it were, brought you home flowers or candy or even just a card saying “hey, you’re not half bad!” on a random tuesday. i’ve always thought valentine’s day was a nice idea in theory, like what waking up on christmas morning used to be, except now you’re older and instead of finding all you’ve ever wanted under the tree, you have the sudden deflating realization for the first time that from now on you will forever be stuck with piles of i-should-have-known-better-than-to-think-this-could-be-anything-but-clothes boxes.

don’t get me wrong. i think valentine’s day is a nice excuse to do something special for the one you love and a friendly reminder to express gratitude for those nearest and dearest. but when that something special is what everyone else is doing for their sweetheart out of commercialized conditioning, i can’t help but think there is little sincerity in simply following the pack and feel the need to rise above and either do something wildly creative or else boycott the holiday altogether.

needless to say, as you could probably gather from my previous strings of frenetic hyphenated thoughts and from my usual passive-aggressive undertones, i (almost always) fall into the latter category. what? i mean, it’s not exactly uncommon for people to feel bitter about v-day and to opt out altogether (and so they wear all black and brood in the corner, feigning bewilderment as to why so many people had the same idea to wear the stupid color red that day. i mean, i’ve never been one of those people… okay, okay, maybe freshman year of high school). but this year was different.

this morning, i woke up next to my partner without a second to spare as i scrambled to get ready well after the final chimes of my alarm. i actually had to ask for a goodbye kiss before parting ways as we both distractedly hurried out the door to our respective obligations. we knew this would be the case ahead of time, so we agreed to keep it simple and save the goods for another day- any day cause who needs a holiday to say “i love you” anyway, right? while jonathan spent his holiday working a double shift on the busiest day of the year in the restaurant industry, my valenthursday consisted of the juggling act of class, errands, work, performing a show, preparing for incoming out-of-town house guests, and playing solo dress up in a photobooth … uh … i can explain-

the idea came from one of our favorite films. this tribute was something simple, something sweet, and it was the perfect way to pose a romantic question. i have never asked someone to be my valentine before (a first!). and what a thrill it was to pull off the plan successfully and just continue about my day as usual. i carried that secret with me all day knowing he wouldn’t be able to see the photo strip until he was home after a long day’s work ( i have a house key. i am secretly a ninja). and that- that sort of happy- happy-with-a-secret-happy is how i feel every day with jonathan. and even though i usually say “bah humbug” to valentine’s day, today i felt so completely grateful to have someone worth wearing four pairs of glasses, a shawl, and a painted on question mark into a movie theatre photo booth midday clad with handmade signs and all, unafraid of strange looks, uninterested in justifying my behavior in public, unconcerned with a reciprocal gesture, unaware that it is anything besides another day in love except for the fact that i have this lovely little excuse pushing me to find a new way to say “i love you.”

so, to the loyal fans of this hallmark holiday, i take back my half-baked tirade against v-day. when you allow yourself to give in to love and let go of that fear of judgement or rejection, be prepared to be surprised. it’s actually kind of nice.

“we are most alive when we’re in love.” -john updike

Who could resist noir for kids?

Title:  Who Could That Be at This Hour                                     Author:  Lemony Snicket                                                          Publisher:  Little Brown Books for Young Readers          Publication Date:  10/23/2012                                                 Format:  Hardcover 272 pages                                                      Genre:  Children’s fiction                                   

Overview:  from Barnes and Noble–   In a fading town, far from anyone he knew or trusted, a young Lemony Snicket began his apprenticeship in an organization nobody knows about. He began asking questions that shouldn’t have been on his mind. Now he has written an account that should not have been published, in four volumes that shouldn’t be read. This is the first volume.

Rating: If you are expecting a children’s book, this may or may not be the book for you.  It is certainly age-appropriate for a nine-year-old.  It is also an expertly crafted spoof of noir fiction, complete with Duke Ellington references.  It’s a 5 of 5 for The Nashville Reader.

An amazing collection of characters that will leave you the wiser and more hopeful for having known them.

Title:  Tenth of December                                                                                Author:  George Suanders                                                          Publisher:  Random House Publishing Group                Publication Date:  01/08/2013                                                 Format:  Hardcover 272 pages                                                      Genre:  literary fiction–short stories

Rating: 6 out of 5.  I’m not a whole-hearted fan of Youssarian, Vonnegut, Defoe or some other great observers of the human condition and circumstance, but George Saunders‘ writing offers me something a little different.  Something I require in an author’s voice, just to finish the book.  The sound of hope.  If you are in need of a realistic adult voice: its observations on our lives and what we are putting forward for posterity, this is the book for you.  Read it twice!

Review:  I may find myself reading these two books again and again all year.  In an inexplicable twist of fate, I read these consecutively and found a commonality in the author’s tone that developed along it’s own trajectory.  If Lemony Snicket is the apprentice fresh from his unusual education, then George Saunders stories are the reports and observations he might make as a wizened adult who understands the mysteries and confluences that bring us to the present.  I found the books to be so compatible in the tone and voice, less because I read them consecutively and more because they are each written in a way that allows the reader to be a conspirator of that mysterious presence in good writing, which frames all Lemony Snicket’s meetings with Ellington Feint in full Duke Ellington marginalia (books in the library with Ellington titles, obscure lyrical references, etc.), that same presence that lets you in on the secret that neither it or you has so very much control over the circumstances that shape parent/child relationships in Saunders’ stories.  Both books to me are about a child’s need to understand his surroundings and exert some control on them to find answers about himself, and an adult’s understanding that the answers to our questions about ourselves are exactly in the center of the dissonance between circumstance and reaction.  To write about anything that philosophical in a meaningful and entertaining way can only be done by master craftsmen.

Thank you gentlemen for allowing my 2013 reading to begin so auspiciously, a word which here means in the best way possible.

For some notes on Snicket’s craftsmanship, please look here at wikia, and here at NPR.  To appreciate George Saunders, please examin your own parent/child relations as thoughtfully as possible.

The sun rides higher

Every trip.

The sidewalk shows.

Icicles drip.

A snowstorm comes,

And cars are stuck,

And ashes fly

From the old town truck.

The chickadees

Grow plump on seed

That Mother pours

Where they can feed,

And snipping, snipping

Scissors run

To cut out hearts

For everyone.

by

John Updike

in

Good Morning to You, Valentine, poems selected by Lee Bennett Hopkins, illustrated by Tommie de Paola

Shaw Collection, PZ8.3 G6

I just got super-excited. I was randomly reading this New Yorker article and at one point, the artist whose work was being described sounded a lot like David Foster Wallace. The artist, Brendan O’Connell, paints a lot of scenes from Wal-Mart, and he told a Boston Globe reporter that

“Trying to find beauty in the least-likely environment is kind of a spiritual practice.”

That line immediately brought to mind DFW’s point about everyday hum-drum life, and the many times we’re stuck in traffic or in a long line at the supermarket. It’s easy to be irritated about all the stuff that is keeping us from having a good time, but DFW says these moments are opportunities to connect with other human beings, to try to imagine what’s going on in others’ worlds.

And bringing these two guys together made me think more about the connection between literature and the visual arts, not least because Brendan O’Connell also mentions being inspired by John Updike’s story “A&P.” I love that story. And the story seems a bit like the Wal-Mart paintings and a bit like DFW.

“A&P” takes this everyday kind of scene of a grocery store, and the main character sees almost all the shoppers as sheep and cows. He sees himself, however, as a gallant hero who must rescue the hot girl in distress (spoiler alert: she gets kicked out of the grocery store for wearing a bathing suit). On the one hand, the story is about pushing ourselves to be epic and heroic through small, everyday gestures. On the other hand, it’s a critique of the shallow main character and his inability to see beyond some overly simplistic story of heroism that he really wants to inhabit.

I think that’s how WalMart art and DFW’s idea about paying attention to the water we’re swimming in need to work. On the one hand, yeah! appreciate that beauty.

On the other hand, notice the ridiculous and extreme consumption and consumerism that characterizes American life. And don’t be afraid to think twice about it.

A snowstorm comes,
And cars are stuck,
And ashes fly
From the old town truck.

“A dictator in a home or in a nation chooses the way of quick returns…There can be a subtle parental pride in exactuing obedience, much like bringing a dog to heel. ‘Good’ children can be displayed, to the parent’s advantage.” (Lionel Whiston, quoted in Peterson, p. 38)

When I graduated from college I moved hundreds of miles from home for my first full-time job. I was engaged, but not yet married. I knew only one other person in the city. So I bought myself a puppy and began to teach him with my spare time. It quickly occured to me that if I trained him to be obedient, he could come with me to the YMCA where I was a volunteer soccer coach. It was rewarding to me to see how quickly he learned and how consistently he obeyed. As a result of significant and consistent attention for those first six months we were together before the wedding, I received praise for the rest of his life for how well mannered and well trained he was. I honestly enjoyed that and began to take some pride in what I good parent I would “obviously” be someday.

The Lord had to humble me after I had my first two children. One day He pulled back a veil from my eyes and let me see my pride and my foolishness. I was not training puppies, I was raising children. I had to weep and repent! He was the primary parent, not me. It was my privilege to join Him. I suddenly saw parenting in terms of stewardship and hospitality, not behavioral outcomes!

Peterson gets at this same issue, I think, when he quotes John Updike on the importance of seeing our children “not as our creations, but our guests, people who enter the world at our invitation…”

Do you agree? When we see parenting in terms of stewardship and hospitality instead of behavioral outcomes, how does that change things? Does that impact decision-making within the family? Does this mean we have to be willing to be embarrassed at times? What does this mean for allowing disagreement? How will parenting like this increase our own discipleship?

Erik Erikson suggests that the problem with forcing obedient behavior is that the parent does not have to become an adult to do so. You don’t have to grow up. You don’t have to learn courtesy or deference or understanding. You are in fact authorized to remain arbitrary and inconsistent. It seems to me that if authority is framed by “because I said so!” then the world view being taught is that whoever is the strongest wins. That may be practical in politics, but it is not a Kingdom worldview. And it is destructive to discipleship.

Peterson uses Luke 2:41-51 to demonstrate that authority when challenged does not bluster, is courteous and is not coercive. He also encourages us to meditate on the authority of our Heavenly Father. He disciplines, but He does not push His children around. How do you understand the discipline of the Lord from Scripture? Is the model craftsman with an apprentice a good model? What is the role of training and instruction? Do you agree with Peterson that “the heart of discipline, and the most biblical expression of authority, is careful attention that guides growth“?

(This post is inspired by chapter 4 of Like Dew Your Youth: Growing Up With Your Teenager by Eugene Peterson. Get a copy of this great little book and check back each Thursday for the next 8 weeks to become part of the discussion).

I actually got done 45 minutes early, which was a relief, even though I ended up hitting the Metro commute traffic twice in one day.

There was commuter traffic on the trains this morning, but mostly coming in from the Periphery, not so much heading out.

I got up at 6 am

I did the deal.

I wrote my three pages long hand.

I ate a good breakfast and had two cups of coffee before scooting out the door.

It was still dark when I left this morning and it was dark upon my return.

I soon must to be in bed as well.

I am not fond of the hours, but I am fond of the fact that I just put 100 Euro towards February rent, which was due four days ago.  My roommate knows that the money is coming, I expect my tax return any moment now.  But it is still really nice to just fork it over, in good faith.

I bought some groceries and I will get paid for tomorrow and I have another gig starting on Wednesday.

I actually have a really full week.

Twelve hours tomorrow, nine hours on Wednesday, meet up with a friend from San Francisco in the evening–he’s coming in via Thailand and I have not see in him in years it feels like, he’ll be in Paris for a couple of months doing work, it will be good to get a little San Francisco flavor here.  Then meet with a ladybug Thursday morning, do the deal at noon, then off to the suburbs on the other side of town to see Corinne and the new baby.

Friday brings a distinct repeat of Thursday with a different lady and then a meet up at Shakespeare and Company with a new friend who may be interested in starting a writers group.  We were supposed to meet last Friday but her husband had to have an emergency root canal.

That shit scares me.

I have nice teeth.

I would like to keep them.

Small aside, really what is the deal with dental floss and why isn’t there any in the store?  I found one, ONE, container of dental floss in the toothpaste aisle.  Flossing, Frenchies, it is important, especially with all the coffee and cigarettes and red wine being imbibed.

I have stellar, rock star teeth in comparison to a lot of the folks I see.

Even on the television today I noticed that.

What is it with a certain economic status, the couch is shite, the flooring scary, there is not any wall decorations pantings or posters hanging on the walls, but my God, there is a state of the art, huge, flat screen television with cable and dvd player and speakers and God only knows how many remotes.

Poverty equals huge television apparently.

I remember a movie that Spike Lee did that I don’t think got paid much attention and it probably should have, called “Bamboozled,” and one of the scenes shows a bunch of squatters in a tenement in with a miraculous amount of cables and wires and McGyvering of extension cords bundled to a television.

I always think of that, checking out through the television and how strapped to the television the impoverished are.

I have not owned one in about fifteen years.

I do watch some television, I won’t lie, I like to down load stuff, but I cannot remember the last time I watched a commercial all the way through.

The French television stations were interesting as I flipped through, the enumerations of MTV channels, the sports shows, the cooking shows, the fashion show channel.

Now I was down with that.

The Paris Spring runways are happening and it was just beautiful clothes gliding down runways with designer disco music playing in the background.

It was like watching Project Runway with none of the drama.  In fact, it was rather soothing.  I watched for a while, but mostly I just read.

Baby sitting equals getting paid to read while naps are happening.

I finished the David Sedaris book, and I started in on The White Review I had gotten from the boy with the Irish eyes.

Said eyes, I noticed yesterday are not actually blue, but more like a sea glass green.

Stunning.

He loaned me The White Review, a collection of essays, poems, articles, and interviews–with the interview of Will Self that we had discussed last week, and I swapped him the newest Will Self-Umbrella.

I will most likely finish the Review tomorrow and I will get started on the Chuck Pahalniuk I picked up last week.  I think, if I do end up going to Shakespeare and Company Friday I am also going to pick up Irvine Welsh’s Skag and if I can nail down a copy of it, finally, Stephen King’s book On Writing.

What I appreciate reading, and why I am just now getting it I don’t know, but….thank God I am allowing myself the ‘pleasure’ of the work, is Will Self reiterating what I have been hearing more and more of, to be a good writer you have to read.

I just used to think I was copping out, checking out, losing myself in words.

And while there is some, possibly a great deal, of validity in this, there is also just the pure joy I get from reading and I know that when I read a good book, Faulkner’s The Sound and The Fury was a huge inspiration when I was writing the last full length manuscript I wrote.

John Updike’s complete works carried me through the rough draft of Baby Girl.

John Irving’s oeuvre brought me through the rough draft of The Iowa Waltz.

Self used a word I had not seen in print in some time “pernicious”.

I fucking love it.

I love words.

I get off on words.

I have two solid hours tomorrow to get my read on.

Ready for it.

And now I basically have to get ready for bed.

So I can get up and write again.